Christopher Reich - The Runner

“I found him upstairs. He was unarmed, pretending to be some sort of building inspector. I called for Honey and then he…” Judge averted his eyes, praying he wasn’t turning some awful shade of crimson.

“He what?”

“He…” Judge was robbed for words. He’d been asking himself the same question since Honey had hauled him off the rotted spar earlier that morning.What happened in there? And its unspoken corollary.Why didn’t you kill him? Hearing the words issue verbatim from Mullins’s lips, he flushed anew with shame and humiliation. For behind them loomed a matter of far greater import: what if his failure to shoot Seyss wasn’t a question of atrophied reflex but of atrophied nerve? “Dammit, Spanner, he was just faster than I was. He jumped me and got the gun. What am I supposed to say?”

“Dev, you were in the same room with the bastard. Did you forget what he’d done to your brother?”

“Of course not,” Judge retorted. “What? You expect me to shoot him on sight? Last I heard it was up to the courts to decide a man’s punishment.”

Mullins’s inched closer, his imposing bulk every bit as threatening as Judge’s stormy conscience. “It’ s just that from that distance a man’s body is like the broad side of a barn. How could you miss? Safety off, hammer back. A funny thing for the academy’s honor graduate to forget.”

“That was eighteen years ago, but if it makes you happy, I didn’t forget.”

“Well, then, lad, if it’s not the technique, the problem must lie elsewhere.” A ruddy hand fell to Judge’s shoulder delivering the brunt of Mullins’s exasperation. “What happened to the young thug I took off the streets? My own Jimmy Sullivan, you were. Tell me true, Dev, when you handed in your detective’s shield, did you toss in your balls along with it?”

Judge knocked the arm away, while somewhere inside him a band snapped. “Go fuck yourself, Spanner.”

Mullins’s face colored and when he spoke his voice was barely a whisper. “You can call me Spanner once you’ve brought in Seyss. Until then, you’ll be wise to remember your manners. It’s Colonel Mullins to you.”

Judge was fed up with Mullins’ silly games. “Then you can tell the colonel to go fuck himself, too!”

Mullins smiled. “There’s my lad. Just wanted to make sure the spirit hadn’t been siphoned out of you. There’s hope, yet.”

The former lieutenant from Brooklyn’s twentieth precinct rose and sauntered from the room, mumbling he was off to find a doctor who could sign “the lad” out. Judge dropped his head on his pillow, wondering if Mullins’s words contained a grain of truth. Since coming to the hospital, he’d been replaying his confrontation with Seyss over and over. He kept seeing Seyss lunge at him, feeling that twinge of hesitation when his finger froze up, and he’d allowed the Nazi swine get the better of him.

“ What happened to the young thug I took off the street? My own Jimmy Sullivan you were. ”

Judge tried without success to shake off the question. He wasn’t one to dwell in the past. He didn’t like recalling those days. Frankly, he had an aversion to looking back. Too many close calls, too many unexplained coincidences. It made him uncomfortable to realize how narrowly his success had been won. But the bite of Mullins’s words whisked away his hesitation and transported him to his youth — to the only day that really mattered: 24 May 1926. And its memory was so sharp, so crystalline, he shivered, even as he sat sweating in his lumpy hospital bed.

It was the cry he remembered most. The old man’s scream when they’d hit him with the blackjack.

Dev and the boys had been hanging around the Maryann Sweet Shop all day long, drinking egg creams and playing quarters in the back alley when the parade went by. A hundred Italian men and women dressed in their Sunday best marching down Pulaski Street — black suits, fedoras, every man a mustache, every woman a shawl — all of them gathered around a two storey papier maché mock-up of Blessed Saint Maria Teresa Whoever carried on their shoulders.

“Look at ’em,” Artie Flannagan had joked. “Just off the boat.”

“Not a real American among ’em,” said Jack Barnes.

But it was Moochy Wills who’d encapsulated their feelings most eloquently. “Fuckin’ wops!”

The escapade was Moochy’s idea. Follow the patron of the society home, give him a sock to the head, and nab the money from the collection plate. The guy would be carrying a hundred easy. Italians weren’t lazy like the Irish. Stupid, maybe, but not lazy.

Twenty years after the fact, Judge could still feel his initial stab of reluctance: the sharp ache in his gut, the sudden loss of breath. He’d acted up before. Ditching school, crashing speakeasies, once, even helping some wise guys unload a few dozen cases of hooch down at Sheepshead Bay in the dead of night. But this was different. This was robbery. He knew it and still he didn’t say a goddamned word.

So they did it, just like Moochy said. They marched behind the parade until it dispersed. They waited outside the tinyristorante while the faithful ate and drank and raised the roof, and when the party was over, they followed Il Padrone home to his apartment in Flatbush. Judge could see them all as if he were watching the scene unfold on the silver screen. Moochy, Jack, Artie, and Dev, perched on the stoop of that rundown tenement. And, of course, Il Padrone . He was an older guy, fifty and slight, wearing a silver sash around his chest decorated with a score of Italian words. Seeing the three strapping teenagers so close, he flinched, then shaking off his fear, offered a smile and a tip of the hat. “ Buona notte ,” he said. Good evening.

“Yer in America,” answered Moochy Wills, raising the blackjack over his head. “Learn to talk fuckin’ English.”

The rest happened fast. Moochy bringing down the jack on the old guy’s neck, the bony hand flailing in the air, hopelessly working to defend himself. Artie and Jack, and yes, Dev, too, throwing in their best kicks, not looking where their work boots struck. Then Moochy clearing them away, wanting the guy for himself, clubbing him over and over until blood poured from his forehead and he’d collapsed to his knees. All of them laughing hysterically, shouting “Fuckin’ wop!” over and over.

And that cry! It wasn’t pain, not even fear. It was worse. It was disappointment. This didn’t happen in America. This was why he’d left Palermo or Naples or wherever the hell he was from. That cry!

Out of nowhere, Artie Flanagan yelled, “Jesus, the cops!” The boys had been so focused on clobbering the old man, none of them had noticed the patrolman twirling his nightstick at the corner of 17thand Newkirk. He was a bear of a copper with a jaw like a steam shovel and a voice to freeze the hair on top of your head. Seeing the old man prostrate on the sidewalk, he shouted for the boys to stop right there and took off toward them with the stride of a thoroughbred. Judge remembered thinking that a big guy couldn’t move that fast. It was impossible.

Moochy grabbed the money from the Italian’s coat and hightailed it down the street. Artie and Jack followed. But Dev didn’t budge. His legs refused to move. He stood rooted to the spot, listening to the immigrant’s pathetic whining. Thing was the Italian had stopped making any noise whatsoever a minute before.

His sentence was three years at Boys’ State. Two for the crime and one on top for not cooperating with the court that is, not ratting out his friends.

The arresting officer, Patrolman Stanley Mullins, presented himself to Judge’s family as they left the courtroom.

“Yes, sir, you’ve got a bad egg, there, Mr Judge,” he said, looking down from his lofty promontory.” A shame he should get into this kind of trouble at so early an age.”